Twincorporated loves Evernote. A full Evernote review is a little beyond our focus and the internet already has many. However, I didn't want that to stop us from exploring some of the specific ways we use Evernote to do parent stuff.

Today's specific parent thing: an Evernote notebook where you can save your child's milestones, photos, and any of your own anecdotes for your child to read in the future. There are a couple of versions of this idea. The one that is usually top of mind is to make your kid an email address and send them photos, thoughts, etc; that accumulate in the inbox; you give the kid the username and password when they turn 18 and there's a magical & digital exchange of experiences.

Email Alternative

I'm not wild about the email idea. If the email address gets out into the wild you've got spam. If you tell the family that you're doing this they might want the email address, and then you're logging into your kids future email inbox of nostalgia to see what your wife's step-uncle emailed your kid. It's just not ideal.

Our solution to this was to create an Evernote notebook just for your kid. Evernote notebooks are useful because they are searchable, shareable, and easy to organize. Once the notebook is shared between parents, both can contribute to the notebook through the Evernote mobile app, the desktop app, or from any computer through the web interface. And, if you really like the draft-my-kid-an-email idea you can still do that and mail it into the Evernote notebook.

Emailing into an Evernote Notebook

Evernote provides an email address for each account that you can use to email notes into a notebook. Within Evernote you can and will likely have multiple notebooks. You can direct the email to whichever notebook you'd like by including @notebookname in the subject line of the email.

Evernote also lets you use tags to keep your notes organized and make it easy to search through them. The Wife and I have created the tag #firsts to keep track of our twins' milestones. So when we wanted to add a "first smile" note to our daughter's notebook, we drafted and email that looked like this:

The Wife and I have created a notebook for each of the twins, and she has already started making notes. Evernote notes can include photos, files, links, and text. It's a deceptively robust little app that has been helping us keep track of our children since before they were born*.